Viscerally grateful--but not for long

Matthew 14:25-32

      Peter's terror in this, one of his characteristic scrapes, spoke differently to me after an experience I had earlier this year. Driving north on Lakeshore on a slightly misty evening, I whipped around a curve and suddenly saw a car stopped ahead of me in the lane, its passengers clustering around it. I slammed on the brakes and suddenly, with a horrible noise, my tiny car was skidding towards the concrete lane divider. I tried to gain control of it, while all I could see were my own headlights on that solid wall ahead of me. Amazingly, though, I came to a stop without hitting either the wall or the stalled car that had caused me to skid. (I realized later that I had turned diagonally but was skidding parallel to the wall, which explained why it had seemed to be rushing up to me for such a long moment.) The other cars also had miraculously avoided me. I sat in my lane shaking and sobbing, "God, you saved my life, you saved my life!"

      In that moment, I felt the hand of God acting in my life as clearly as if I were holding Jesus' hand to keep out of the waves. But I'm like Peter: no matter how many times God teaches me with stories, yanks me away from catastrophe or fills my nets with fish, I fall back into apathy and doubt. One minute we're transfixed with joy at Jesus' saving power; a few minutes later we realize it's the middle of the night, we've still got to row his prayer-boat back to shore, and our feet are wet. The annoyances of life—especially if we forget that life is in Jesus' service—crowd on top of these Kairos moments as fast as I went into my skid, and with the same power to obliterate all our joy. I've known this story all my life without reading it quite this way, and I'd lacked this perspective on my almost-crash until I read it again: the light hit the mirror just right, and I was able to see myself.